The Age of Miracles is a “big” book about small moments. Karen Thompson Walker’s debut novel imagines a future in which the world slowly stops spinning, but instead of inflicting the earth with one catastrophe after another, like the similarly-plotted film The Core, Walker’s novel instead focuses on a year in the life of an 11-year-old girl named Julia, who lives with her parents in a suburb of Los Angeles.

A few days before we sat down with Walker, a 32-year-old former editor at Simon & Schuster, the world clock was saddled with an extra second — perfect timing for a novel about the days getting longer, though, Walker laughs, even her publisher couldn’t arrange that kind of publicity.

Q: When did you start this book?

A: The first kernel of the idea came to me in 2004, when I was in graduate school. I read a newspaper article shortly after the earthquake that caused the tsunami in Indonesia. I read that that earthquake was so powerful that it had affected the rotation of the earth, and had shortened our days as a result by a few microseconds per day. I just started to wonder and worry a little bit right away: what would happen if a much more dramatic — and larger — shift were to take place? I wrote a short story in which the rotation of the earth sped up, then I set it aside for three or four years. I came back to it a few years later, after I’d started working in book publishing. For some reason, it occurred to me to reverse it — have the earth slowing down. And that was a key change; from then on, I started to feel like maybe it could be a novel.

Q: Do you think working in publishing prepared you for this experience?

A: I don’t know. I was really prepared for disappointment. I still feel a little shocked to have had the opposite experience so far.

Q: Is the book you set out to write the same book you published?

A: That’s a hard question to answer. I feel like writing a book there’s always a version in your head that’s an amazing version, but then you write the version that you can write. But I feel happy with how it turned out in the end. When I set out to write it, I just wrote the only version of a disaster novel that I would want to write, or could write. But [not] until I was done did I fully think about how it is so much more about the small moments between people than some disaster novels are. I love conventional apocalypse movies. In movies, I like to be with the President, or the scientist trying to solve the problem, but that’s not the kind of fiction that I like to read.

Q: Does the premise of this novel stem from concerns you have about the environment?

A: I didn’t have a message in mind, but I was always looking for parallels to try and better understand how people would react to something like this. One of those definitely is climate change, and the various ways people react to it, especially because it is a long-term problem. In general, I think I’m quick to worry about disasters of all kinds.

Q: Do you think that’s because you were raised in California, a place where you’re always at the mercy of nature?

A: It’s true. Sometimes I think I wouldn’t have written this book exactly in this way if I didn’t grow up in California. Even though, in the book, there’s this huge change causing all these strange consequences, there is still time for daily life to continue, and I feel living in California can be like that, because most days, obviously, an earthquake does not occur, but you have that sort of looming: that an earthquake — or a brush fire — could change your life in a second, but yet you don’t really think about it that much.

Q: Life has to go on.

A: I think as long as ordinary life can go on, then that’s what we do.

Q: When did you leave California?

A: When I was 23. Now I’m 32.

Q: You must have lived through some earthquakes. Is San Diego on the same fault as San Francisco and Los Angeles?

A: It is. Major earthquakes are slightly less common there, but definitely not impossible. Not even unlikely. Feeling earthquakes was part of growing up, and also preparing for them: doing earthquake drills, or having earthquake supplies. The looming feeling was part of my life. My experience of earthquakes has always been more the fear of them, or the possibility.

Q: At one point, Julia’s piano teacher, Sylvia, says that art thrives in uncertain times. And it occurred to me you were probably wrote most of this after the economic collapse. Do you think that affected the book?

A: It did a little. Obviously the situation they’re facing in the book is a lot worse, and a lot more profound, I think — especially because it affects the history of humanity on earth. But I was writing it during that time.

Q: How would you react if the slowing actually occurred? Would you be a headcase like Julia’s mom, a rock like her father, or would you be the contrarian, like Sylvia?

A: Interesting question. A lot of people have asked would I be a clock-timer or a real-timer. I think I would have a hard time staying calm, but hopefully I wouldn’t go as crazy as the mother.

• The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker is published by Doubleday Canada ($29.95). This interview has been condensed and edited.

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